Fortunate Lives (13 page)

She finally fished out a piece of newspaper and unfolded
it to reveal an entire page. She disengaged herself from Anna Tyson and showed Dinah the photo of the finished product, beautifully
displayed in a soup tureen shaped like a dragon, under the heading “Soup for When It’s Sizzling!” Dinah quickly scanned to
the beginning of the recipe:

18 beets, boiled, peeled, and cut into ½-inch dice

And she stood in her own kitchen, on a nice day in July, and was overwhelmed momentarily by the idea that her life was going
to be an endless round of chores and obligations for the rest of her days. She shut out the conversation going on around her
as she carefully read through the long recipe. When she looked up, she saw that Martin had moved over to Netta and was frowning
down at her, and David had come farther into the room to hear what Netta was saying.

“No, no,” she was answering Martin, “I don’t think he would actually
hurt
me… but he’s so needy, you see.
That’s
what I’m afraid of. I mean, I’m afraid of not being able to leave again. I got all the way to Cambridge one day and called
the apartment to be sure he and Celia weren’t there, but I couldn’t make myself go in. I just stood across the street and
couldn’t stop shaking.” This revelation seemed to surprise her. “I’m afraid of Celia, too. I mean, there are ways in which
I’ve
let
them
down. Well, I’ve got Anna Tyson. I couldn’t have left if she hadn’t been with me, but they need her, too.”

“Maybe we could help you get whatever you need when we move David into his dorm,” Martin said, and Netta glanced up at him
and smiled a smile that was like her voice, wistfully sweet, the impression of it lingering for a moment after it had disappeared.

David stood against the counter. “We could go in anytime. We don’t have to wait that long. You wouldn’t even
have to go if you could tell us what you want us to get.”

“Really? Are you serious? Because that would be wonderful. No, I need to go, too, but that would just be wonderful, David,
to have you and Martin help me. It’s been so long since there was anyone I felt I could ask, because all our friends were
mutual
—Bill’s and mine, I mean.”

Dinah looked away and met Christie’s gaze, which turned into a quick glance of pure appeal, but Dinah turned away from that,
too, because she simply couldn’t sort it all out. There was something disturbing in the air. It was startling to her to imagine
David so separate from them that he could be helping strangers move in and out of apartments on streets Dinah had never seen,
living a life of which she would not catch a glimpse.

Gradually everyone in the kitchen became involved with Netta’s beets. She stood at the sink, watching water run over them
in the colander, and finally Dinah moved over next to her, edging her aside, and began cleaning them with a vegetable brush.

“What should we do with the greens?” Netta said. “There weren’t any beets at Price Chopper, so I went to The Whole Grain Elevator
and they had these. Aren’t they beautiful? But the woman thought I was buying them for the greens. She said they’re delicious
and don’t have a trace of pesticide on them.”

Sarah began to look through
The Joy of Cooking
for basic directions for boiling beets. “I can’t believe this!” Netta had said when she had searched through various other
books. “Even
Julia
doesn’t say anything about how long to boil them. She says
canned
beets can be substituted in most recipes!”

Martin got out Dinah’s stockpot, filled it with hot water from the tap, and put it on to boil.

“My mother always says that cold water comes to a boil faster, Mr. Howells,” Christie offered from where she still stood right
inside the back door.

“Right, Christie,” David said. “That really makes sense, doesn’t it?” David spoke as if he were teasing her, but there was
an unmistakable edge of derision in his voice.

“I never said I could
cook
, David,” Christie snapped back. The room went silent while the implication of what she might have said she
could
do hung awkwardly in the air. Everyone but Netta and Anna Tyson picked up on it and was embarrassed, especially Christie.
“Well, I’ve got to go. But what about tonight, David? Are we going to the movie or do you want me to see if everyone can come
over to swim?” Christie had lowered her voice and aimed her question only at David so that the rest of the family could pretend
that any disagreement between the two of them had not been overheard.

“I don’t know,” David answered. “Why don’t I call you later,” and he didn’t even look at her. She picked up a light jacket
she had dropped on the kitchen counter and pushed open the screen door.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said with sugary exaggeration, pretending that she wasn’t mocking David’s rudeness, “I’m going over
to Meg’s and
then
I’m having a party at my house. I’ll call you if we’re short of guests.”

Dinah looked at her in surprise. It was the first time she had discerned anything much about Christie’s personality, and Dinah
was startled to find that just as Christie let the screen door fall shut behind her, she glanced at Dinah again with some
sort of mute appeal as she went off down the steps.

“It says here to ‘chop the greens coarsely and let them simmer gently in the water in which they are washed,’” Netta read
aloud from a dog-eared, spiral-bound cookbook she had found among the others.

“They’re awfully sandy, Netta. Do you think it’s worth it?” Dinah began to lift the severed leaves one by one under running
water, while Netta dropped the scrubbed beets into the pot on the stove. Dinah was finding that she had to rub
the sand away with her thumb, and even so she could still feel a persistent gritty residue. The entire sink and the counter
around it were spattered with sand and mud and seeping red juice that exuded even from the cuts across the leaf stems. She
was absorbed in this project for a bit until she looked up and realized that Sarah had disappeared, and that David and Martin
were sitting at the table drinking coffee on either side of Anna Tyson, who had put her cheek down on the placemat in front
of her and fallen fast asleep. Netta had drifted away from the boiling beets and was leaning on a chair, discussing some point
of her article that was to be published in
The Review.

“It’s not my field, but I assumed that’s what your intention was,” Martin said.

“No,” Netta said severely, and with a slight frown. “It is exactly my point that Foucault
doesn’t
take into account—”

“I’ll get out of your way here, Netta,” Dinah interrupted. “Too many cooks, you know.” She hated black coffee, but she poured
a cup anyway, not wanting to linger long enough to scald milk. “I hope all those cookbooks aren’t in the way. Sarah left them
out, but you can put them back if you need the room. Where did she go? I need her to vacuum. And David, would you put away
the extra chairs we set up on the porch for the party? You can stack them in the garage if you would. I’m going to straighten
up the living room. We didn’t quite finish last night. I could use a hand, Martin, taking the extra leaves out of the table.
Do you want to help me now?”

Dinah walked off down the hall, stopping to take a sip of coffee while she waited for Martin. She had no inclination to treat
Netta as a guest. Usually the disorganization of a party lingered in her household for a week or so because she wasn’t a particularly
ardent housekeeper, but this morning she launched into more than business as usual.

Martin stored the extra leaves of the table in the attic, and Dinah followed him up the narrow stairs to find the
protective flannel sleeves that fit over them to keep the wood from being scratched.

The tension this year in their summer household unnerved Martin. He couldn’t fathom Dinah’s emotion; his sympathy was primarily
with his son. The situation reminded him of his own leave-taking almost thirty years ago when his mother had unwittingly burdened
him with the knowledge of her expectations of their continued connection. He had felt suffocated and guilty when almost everyday
he had received in the mail from her some clipping from the local paper, a brief note of affection, or a recounting of the
current gossip.

In his freshman year, when she had baked him a birthday cake and sent it on a Greyhound bus, he had discarded it right outside
the station before any of his friends discovered it. He remembered her intimidating assumption of their familiarity, when,
in fact, she knew nothing about his life as he had lived it at college. So many people—including his father—had warned him
of the inadequacies of his Mississippi education that he had been afraid to unpack his trunk the entire first year of classes.
He liked to know that he could pull his belongings together and leave in no more than ten minutes if it came to that, if he
flunked out.

The summer before he left, when she had overheard his father warning him of all the pitfalls of an eastern education, his
mother had waved her hand in dismissal of everything her husband was saying. “Oh, heavens, Theo, no school can possibly require
more than
brilliance
!” But Martin hadn’t been grateful to her; he had preferred his father’s uncertainty about his abilities and his warnings
against hubris. Because in all of her reassurance, in her faith in him, in her claustrophobic insistence of her knowledge
of his character—in all of this—hadn’t he sensed some kind of alarming idea of his
beholdenness
to her?

And it was still true, really. He had been irritated when Dinah had reminded him to call his mother over the weekend,
and then he had been surprised that he was insulted when his mother had sweetly hurried him off the phone because her bridge
group was meeting. He had been injured in the same way, although certainly not to the same degree, when his mother had seemed
to take it as a matter of course when he had, indeed, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard.

He showered, and before he left to meet Vic at
The Review
office, Martin folded the extra chairs on the porch and stacked them away neatly in the garage because he had seen David’s
expression when Dinah had breezily issued instructions for the day. His whole face had tightened, his eyes becoming slightly
hooded, his mouth drawn in—it was an expression amazingly like Dinah’s when she harbored a resentment. He knew that David
had no intention of doing anything his mother asked him this morning.

Dinah stripped the beds and found Sarah and set her to work with the vacuum. Sarah was surprisingly agreeable. “I think they
invented Bremner wafers to make people look like pigs,” Sarah offered as she unwound the cord. “Did you notice last night
that everyone was covered with little flakes of white crumbs?”

But Dinah didn’t even smile. She went off to straighten the guest bathroom and put out fresh towels. She was passing through
the kitchen with a basket of dirty laundry, on her way to the washing machine in the basement, when Netta stopped her. She
and David were at the table chatting while Anna Tyson had her chocolate milk.

“Oh, Dinah, I couldn’t find the chopping blade for your Cuisinart. Don’t you think that would be the simplest way to dice
the beets?”

Dinah was struck by the bitter odor permeating the air. She could even taste it on the back of her tongue. “What’s that smell?
Is something burning?”

Netta got up and gingerly peered into a skillet that was steaming on a front burner. “Oh, I don’t think these greens
worked,” she said, bemused. “They aren’t burning, but they don’t look very good, do they?”

Dinah leaned over to look at them. They were a slippery mass, all the leaves wilted around the prominent center veins so that
they seemed mildly anatomical. “Maybe you should take them off the heat,” Dinah said. “I don’t think you should use the Cuisinart
for the beets, Netta. I mean, it won’t
dice
them for you, and you’ve got to peel them anyway.”

“Oh, that’s right. It was such a long time ago that I made this soup, I’ve forgotten what I did. How do you peel beets?” Netta
was wearing another of her long, flowing skirts and a sort of little girl’s blouse, the kind Dinah had worn at summer camp
years and years ago, with short sleeves and one breast pocket. Netta’s hair, in the steamy humidity of the kitchen, still
frizzed around her long face, and she
was
oddly appealing, but Dinah didn’t give in. She set the laundry basket down by the door to the basement and took the time
to fix herself café au lait. She sat down at the table, crossing her legs as she settled back in her chair.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s probably like peeling boiled yams. They have a kind of thick, soft skin.” She wasn’t going
to offer another thing, even though she was aware of David’s indignation. He didn’t glance at her as he got up to lend a hand
to Netta, who seemed to be bewildered as she stood looking into the pot of still-boiling beets.

“I’ll pour them into the colander for you,” he said to Netta. As he emptied the pot slowly into the wide stainless-steel colander,
a pinkish mist rose in the air, tingeing the shiny white cupboards above the sink, and pink water splattered over the counter
next to the stove.

“You know what?” Anna Tyson said to Dinah suddenly, with a note of challenge. Dinah shifted in her chair to look at her, not
bothering to answer or even to assume an air of interest. She was wary of Anna Tyson. “My crown wasn’t like anybody else’s.”
She looked directly at Dinah, waiting
for a response, but Dinah couldn’t think of anything to say. She was sorry Anna Tyson had noticed the difference. Sarah had
made the last-minute crown out of aluminum foil that had been applied to the cut-out cardboard too hastily, giving the finished
product a forlorn, crumpled look.

Anna Tyson continued. “Netta told me that Moonflower and the spider are just puppets.” At once Dinah was less sorry for Anna
Tyson and mildly offended, as she always was when children called their parents by their first names; it struck Dinah as an
unusually grating affectation. “But I know why my crown was different.” Anna Tyson had lowered her voice to a tone of confidentiality.
Dinah was so disheartened at the idea of explaining to this four-year-old that the charade of Moonflower was meant with every
good intention that she didn’t respond at all; she only looked off into the center of the room, hoping Anna Tyson would lose
interest in the conversation.